La Lavenda Queso de Oveja con Trufa - Truffle Manchego

From La Lavenda in La Mancha, Spain, this is a sheep's milk Manchego-style cheese with real black truffle worked through the paste.

The paste is firm and pressed, dense and a little oily the way good sheep's milk cheese should be, breaking into clean slabs under the knife with dark veins of truffle running through. On the palate it leads with the classic Manchego nuttiness, toasted hazelnut and a quiet brown-butter pull, then the truffle opens up through the middle and lingers on the finish. Earthy, mushroomy, forest-floor truffle, not the chemically oily flavor you get in lesser truffle cheeses. It tastes like the real thing because it is the real thing.

This sits right in the sweet spot for truffle cheese. The sheep's milk gives it enough backbone to carry the truffle without disappearing, and the truffle is dosed honestly, so it reads as savory depth rather than perfume. One of those cheeses that wins over people who think they don't like truffle cheese.